


know what's good

by endquestionmark



Series: take my soul away [2]
Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 21:10:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4640346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re not very good at this, are you?” Lex had said, one day, before; in his office, probably, or some empty floor of a half-constructed building on the edge of Metropolis, sun going down over the bay. Clark can’t quite remember. Lex doesn’t own a room when he walks into it, because he doesn’t try. Instead, the silence spreads outwards from wherever he is, less disruptive than a ripple and more insistent than a whisper, and then it doesn’t matter how quietly he talks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	know what's good

**Author's Note:**

> A companion piece to [gods and monsters](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4334915), because I am chronically incapable of leaving well enough alone. I'm giving [Cat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit) far too much credit lately but, again, blame where blame is due. As a companion piece, it shares warnings, for the most part, with a little more emphasis on the power dynamics and, once again, completely lacks any regard for Snyder-established canon.

“You’re not very good at this, are you?” Lex had said, one day, before; in his office, probably, or some empty floor of a half-constructed building on the edge of Metropolis, sun going down over the bay. Clark can’t quite remember. Lex doesn’t own a room when he walks into it, because he doesn’t try. Instead, the silence spreads outwards from wherever he is, less disruptive than a ripple and more insistent than a whisper, and then it doesn’t matter how quietly he talks. Clark had just come from work, and on the way, he had heard the whisper of a fire building to an inferno, and held up a weight-bearing beam for long enough to clear the floor before the roof had fallen through; he brushed uselessly at the ash ground into the edges of the symbol on his chest, and Lex had tilted his head at it. “Being the cape. Hope and so on. You aren’t used to it.”

“You don’t owe us a thing,” his mother used to say, and does more often these days, when he has the time to visit her — rookie at the Planet isn’t a job with a lot of spare time — and she looks tired, always has, a little, but now she looks tired for him, and Clark doesn’t know how to ease the weight that she’s carrying. “Clark, all you ever have to be is yourself, and happy.” _This doesn’t make you happy_ , she hadn’t said.

It doesn’t, but there’s nothing he can do about that. Even if Clark doesn’t wear the cape, he’ll still hear it all: the hiss of an unlit stove, a driver’s muffled curse and the screech of wheels, a woman crying ninety stories up, outdoors, and the wind whipping away the sound of it before anyone else can tell. He can’t listen to that and not do something. His parents brought him up to do what he can to ease the burdens of those around him, and he can do that in a way that other people can’t; he doesn’t know if he could do anything else, then. If Clark can carry it all, what would he be if he didn’t?

“It’s just—” he had said, to Lex, and dug ash out of the seams with his fingernail, and tried to think of the word “—confusing,” he said, settling for an approximation of what he meant. Lex seemed to understand. “I don’t know if I’m actually doing anything, or if I’m doing what people want, or what they need, and which one is better. If someone wants something that badly, even if it isn’t what they need, how do you say no to that?”

“Because you know,” Lex had said. “You have to be sure. For someone they’re calling a false god, you’re more Peter on the waves than Peter the rock, aren’t you?”

Clark hadn’t had anything to say to that. He doesn’t know how this godhood is supposed to work, not at all; he sees the way that people look at him, sometimes, and it frightens him. They look at him like they want to pull him to pieces. They look at him as if they are hungry. Before he takes to the sky, sometimes, swarmed by reporters and bystanders, he thinks that they’ll pick him clean, looking for some quality that he isn’t sure that he possesses, some token of otherness. Clark wants to tell them that there’s no magic to him, nothing to be had from touching the hem of his cape or eating his heart but dust and salt. He looks at Lois, at Lex, and thinks that they have something which he never will, and which is the real hope, never mind what he might wear on his chest.

“They don’t exactly offer that as a high school elective in Smallville,” he had said, instead, and Lex had looked at him with a little too much assessment to his expression for Clark to focus on Lex’s half-smile of amusement.

“Might want to rethink that,” he had said, instead, and Clark had thought that this was people did, wasn’t it? They talked, and they laughed, and sometimes he could be just — not quite Clark Kent, but — not the cape, anyway, or the symbol, or the hyperbole, just for a while; stolen time, it felt like, and yet not enough of it.

Anyway, that had been before, and then, for a while, during, and even then it had been a relief, to be treated as something other than a symbol. Not that Lex hadn’t done that, a little, understood the optics of Clark on his knees, Clark covered in someone else’s blood and bone fragments, splattered across his colors, Clark statue-still and waiting for permission, but that had been different, too, because it hadn’t been Clark he’d been looking at then, but Superman, and he’d known the difference, and so Clark had too.

It’s been a while since he’s needed a reminder of who he is, and what he is, sometimes, and who he belongs to, when he’s being an incandescent arc, a call to follow that he doesn’t need to worry about, anymore, because they aren’t following him — the people in the street, the people looking out windows, the cameras and the cell phones and the whispers — they’re following _it_ , and _it_ isn’t a human, isn’t even a person, and _it_ heels, when it’s called.

Lex sees the symbol, when he looks out his penthouse window, and Clark doesn’t have to think; Lex sees Clark, just him, the shell of him around the stories, and Clark understands his cruelty as the caring that it is, and that he needs. He thinks, now, that he wants it, as well, and that at least this isn’t something that he has to puzzle out anymore: what’s right, and what’s good, and which of the two he is, most of the time. He’ll always put aside death for life, when he can. There are still some things that he’s trying to learn. He can’t see people as numbers, or as pieces on a playing board; there are things that Lex tells him to do that Clark doesn’t understand, more often than not, and he doesn’t have to think about whether, in a month, he’ll understand just a little more of the world that feels less his now than ever, and remember that intentions aren’t enough.

As much as he wants to, Clark doesn’t belong here, not in a world he could break so easily; it still hurts, but at least he doesn’t have to trust his own judgment any more.

He doesn’t have to avoid the sun anymore, not after Lex peeled him apart the way that Clark was always afraid someone would, skin and twitching muscle and the shocking smoothness of viscera, but instead of looking at him like candlelight, like stained glass and sanctuary and the long progress up the nave — something that Clark isn’t, and never will be — Lex had looked at him like the scientists that Clark had been taught to be wary of since childhood, appraising and fascinated by something no longer a person, but an assemblage of tissue and incipient trauma.

He had left the kryptonite for last, that time, taking his time to assay Clark’s constituent parts, and Lex had folded it, eventually, into Clark’s hand like a gift, smoothed his skin back into place and drawn the tip of his finger down the line of his incision, from the point of Clark’s sternum to the blood drying sticky low on his belly, had thumbed over the ridge of his hip. Clark had tried to thank him, exhaled the words as if they were more natural to him than breathing, and Lex had laid his hand over Clark’s mouth.

“You don’t have to thank me,” he had said, and even then, Clark hadn’t been able to stop thinking, had thought, _yes, I do_. He still doesn’t know about good, or right, but he knows what he can be, a gift that he can only repay through becoming, and the sun, when Clark looks up, is bright and uncomplicated, buoys him up until he falls into the sky, easy as breathing and much less complicated, lighter than air, and listens.

 


End file.
